As a business, you continually purchase equipment, software, tools, services, and other technology assets. With so many assets to worry about, things can quickly become overwhelming to track. Your inventory is growing alongside your business, and you might decide that neglecting the need to track your assets is easier. However, avoiding your mountain of assets isn’t going to make them organize themselves.

Did you include Inventory Management Requirements in your RFP for Telecom Expense Management? You are in the middle of preparing your Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Information (RFI) to renew or change TEM Vendor. You got to draft the right requirements, but where do you start? Choosing the right telecom expense management solution can be a laborious task, as there are many of them (about 200 TEM competitors – According to Gartner). They offer different services and software, and you have to make sure you ask the right questions before choosing which one you’ll want to work with. You’ve probably thought of asking the obvious questions about invoice loading, auditing and dispute management, but did you consider questions on Inventory Management? This article will give you some key questions you should include in your RFP or RFI.

Company types vary a lot, going from small family businesses to international-scale giants. This of course implies many different types of IT and telecom inventories as well, and when a potential customer is approaching us, the first thing we do is to look at what makes their inventories specific, thus providing a tailored services to their environment. Let’s see how recently, we had a particularly interesting experience with one of our clients, and how this helped us build a strong relationship with them.

Lately, we’ve been asked a lot of questions about IT asset management, IT service management, and telecom expense management. These questions are coming from many people in many fields. We’re always glad to explain the nuts and bolts about these three disciplines, but it just might be more helpful to put the answers in one place.

*Please note that Etelesolv has changed its company name to Cimpl in 2016. Three excellent reasons to attend the 2015 CIO Canada Summit! The CIO Canada Summit is an annual meeting of technology leaders. This year it’s in Montreal. Here are three reasons why you need to attend: It’s in Montreal, and Montreal is an AWESOME city to visit (try the poutine!) You will enrich your understanding of technology By participating in Etelesolv’s Roundtable at the summit, you will get a headstart into managing the next five years’ business IT for success! That’s right, from February 8 to 10, Etelesolv (now Cimpl) is leading a roundtable at the 2015 CIO Canada Summit, which will take place at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. The CIO Canada Summit is one of the best places to help industry leaders navigate issues in business IT! Mark your agendas right now for Monday February 9th at 12:45PM! The CIO Canada Summit is an annual meeting where technology experts share their knowledge with IT executives who are eager to optimize their businesses through embracing the latest IT. The CIO Canada Summit offers a great opportunity for CIOs to network and learn insights from technology innovators and giants to help resolve technology challenges!

There’s a huge source of valuable insights that we frequently miss It’s easy to see industry trends by looking at hard data, but this approach offers no deep insights about people’s more nuanced experiences inside an industry. In fact, we frequently miss critical insights precisely because we don’t take the time to really listen to what people have to say in longer conversations. This is in fact, the entire rationale for having focus groups – it’s a chance to really probe for meaningful thoughts in deep discussions.

Fall is here. The leaves are changing colour and falling, the kids have been back to school for a while, and it’s now time to prepare for the coming cold months (both physically and mentally). It’s also a good moment to do some serious cleanup: There are leaves to rake and summer toys to (finally) put away. It’d be good to also clean things up at work as well. Personally, fall is when I tend to clear out paperwork and think of ways to be more efficient. This second part also extends to doing proper cleanup of your IT and telecom inventory to reduce your expenses!

See Why You Need a Telecom Audit - Part 1 of 2 The first step to conducting an audit is recognizing that you may have a problem. Most IT professionals are savvy innovators and lousy accountants. The really good ones recognize it and seek out expertise on carrier billing. Consistent with industry stats, my experience confirms an organization will save between 10 and 30% by conducting an audit of Telecom billing. If you are tasked with conducting an audit and the thought is overwhelming, then here is an approach that will at least get you started. Phase One: Make a list of all accounts for telecom related services invoiced monthly, quarterly and annually. Categorize each invoice, wireless, wire line, infrastructure, managed services, maintenance and so forth. Make a list of all the locations that your organization provisions telecom for including branches, third party, home offices and make note of historical sites that are no longer operational. Locate / source and compile all carrier contracts. Correlate account / location / contract information. This will not be complete at this stage; however, it is the beginning of the identification and inventory creation process. Closed locations are frequently the source of billing issues and low hanging fruit in the audit process. Prioritize your data for review by category. You may want to start with a service type you are more familiar with on which you can cut your teeth before advancing to a data source you are not so familiar with. Source any missing documentation from your carrier on an as need basis. These include customer service or equipment records, inventory records where only summary invoices are provided and missing contracts and maintenance agreements. The audit process like project management, is a continuous breakdown of activities into manageable units of work. With the data in hand, and your priorities accounted for, break each account down further by service within account and by location. Each service should have an assignment or intended purpose. You will quickly identify services that need to be disconnected. Calling, suspending, reviewing HR records, and tracing lines are a few of the auditor’s tactics in determining the validity of the service.

About Us

Cimpl is leading the revolution in telecom, IT and cloud expense management. Its software-as-a-service platform brings together actionable data analytics and automates business processes to ensure optimal ROI on technology assets.